How the Holocaust shaped one author’s life and literary career

Nathan Eng­lander and his sister grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family and often played the “Anne Frank game,” won­dering which of their gen­tile neigh­bors would hide them in the event of a second Holocaust.

“The Holo­caust is woven into my under­standing of the world,” said Eng­lander, now the inter­na­tion­ally best­selling author of the award-​​winning short story col­lec­tion What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. “How do we remember? Who owns his­tory? And how do we gift a memory across time?”

Eng­lander, a fifth-​​generation Amer­ican, explored these ques­tions and the com­plexity of shed­ding light on cul­ture and iden­tity through a Jewish lens in the second annual Morton E. Rud­erman Memo­rial Lec­ture on Monday evening in West Vil­lage F. The lec­ture was spon­sored by the Rud­erman Family Foun­da­tion and pre­sented by the Jewish Studies Pro­gram and the North­eastern Human­i­ties Center, both housed in the Col­lege of Social Sci­ences and Human­i­ties. The lec­ture honors the memory of Morton E. Rud­erman, who grad­u­ated in 1959 with an engi­neering degree and died in 2011 at the age of 75 after estab­lishing the trustee Rud­erman Chair in Jewish Studies.

“This lec­ture series is an oppor­tu­nity to engage with promi­nent artists and writers who raise ques­tions of uni­versal sig­nif­i­cance,” said Uta Poiger, the interim dean of the Col­lege of Social Sci­ences and Human­i­ties. “Reading great lit­er­a­ture can be trans­for­ma­tive for anyone in any field.”

Just ask Lori Lefkovitz, the Rud­erman Pro­fessor of Jewish Studies, who clas­si­fied Eng­lander as a master sto­ry­teller. With work trans­lated into more than a dozen lan­guages, he was selected as one of “20 Writers for the 21st Cen­tury” by The New Yorker and has received many pres­ti­gious awards, including a Guggen­heim Fel­low­ship and a PEN/​Malamud Award.

“Nathan knows how to tell a good story,” Lefkovitz said in her intro­duc­tory remarks. “When I read his fic­tion, I some­times laugh out loud, often through my tears.”

Audi­ence mem­bers laughed during Englander’s reading of the title story in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, a poignant por­trait of two Jewish cou­ples who sit around a kitchen table drinking and talking about reli­gious identity.

In one par­tic­u­larly off­beat scene, two Holo­caust sur­vivors get­ting dressed in a gym locker room find out that their con­cen­tra­tion camp iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tat­toos are only five num­bers apart.

“All that means is, he cut ahead of me in line. There, same as here. This guy’s a cutter, I just didn’t want to say,” one sur­vivor says. “Blow it out your ear,” the other says.

In spite of the levity Eng­lander brings to his prose, the goal of his writing has always been to explore how the past informs the future, whether the end game is pre­venting another geno­cide or civil war.

“We don’t know how to stop these things as global soci­eties,” said Eng­lander, refer­ring to the civil war in Syria and the geno­cides in Rwanda and Darfur. “I don’t write about Jewish people,” he added. “I write about people.”

Fol­lowing his lec­ture, Eng­lander answered ques­tions posed by audi­ence mem­bers. One person asked how sur­vivors have responded to his writing.

“It’s not threat­ening to sur­vivors I have spoken to,” said Eng­lander, who dis­cussed his writing process with a group of stu­dents in the Human­i­ties Center ear­lier in the day. “These are heroic people. They’re unbe­liev­able to me.”

About the Writer

Jason Kornwitz, AS' 08, has called Northeastern home since 2003. In his spare time, he enjoys playing sports, watching pretentious movies, and cooking kingly breakfasts. Follow him on Twitter @jasonkornwitz.

News@Northeastern is Northeastern University’s primary source of news and information. Whether it happens in the classroom, in a laboratory, or on another continent, we bring you timely stories about every aspect of life, learning and discovery at Northeastern. Contact the news team